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University of Padua

Along with such universities as Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, that of Padua was one of the first to exemplify the idea of a Gymnasium Omnium Disciplinarum - an educational model that can now be seen throughout the world. Though the university's year of foundation is generally given as 1222, that in fact only marks the date from which there are records of a 'fixed and publicly recognised university established within the city' and so the actual foundation can be dated even early, to a period when a number of professors and students had left the University of Bologna as a result of 'offences to academic freedom and the failure to observe the privileges that had been guaranteed to teachers and pupils'. Such exchanges of personnel and students - together with the similarities in the Statutes of the two foundations - reveal that Padua placed a certain importance on this link with what was the oldest university in the world, against which it was however very soon setting itself up as a rival (and even centuries later that rivalry has lost none of its edge).